Sri Aurobindo

Letters on Poetry and Art

SABCL - Volume 27

Part 2. On His Own and Others’ Poetry
Section 1. On His Poetry and Poetic Method
Inspiration, Effort, Development

Reading, Yogic Force and the Development of Style [3]

To try to be a literary man and yet not to know what big literary people have contributed would be inexcusable.

Why is it inexcusable? I don’t know what the Japanese or the Soviet Russian writers have contributed, but I feel quite happy and moral in my ignorance. As for reading Dickens in order to be a literary man, that’s a strange idea. He was the most unliterary bloke that ever succeeded in literature and his style is a howling desert.

19 September 1936